Return of the Frontiersman

Return Of The Frontiersman casts Gordon MacRae as the brawling son of sheriff Jack Holt who has to arrest Gordon after a saloon brawl with a local tough. Holt gives his son 10 days to think it over. But when after his sentence is done and the man who MacRae brawled with winds up dead and a rider later seen committing crimes on a pinto horse like MacRae rides, he's got himself quite a jackpot. Holt doesn't like it, but he's an honest sheriff of the frontier.

To not keep Gordon MacRae from using his singing voice would have been a crime itself so Jack Warner allowed a cowboy ballad for Gordon to sing while in the calaboose. He also gives Julie London to him as a leading lady. She gets kind of drafted into helping him the same way Madeline Carroll was drafted to helping Robert Donat in The 39 Steps. Alas though Julie London sings not a note.

Return Of The Frontiersman was the kind of film that Warner Brothers wasn't known for making, a B picture western which they hadn't done too much of since Dick Foran was their singing cowboy in the late Thirties. MacRae sits the saddle well as he would later in Oklahoma.

Nice and fast moving is Return Of The Frontiersman although anyone should be able to figure out just who put MacRae in the jackpot.